NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Mathematics support centre attendees and their use of online resources
No full textIn this paper we consider survey results which focus on student use of online resources, where all respondents were attendees of a Mathematics Support Centre. We see that while most respondents are engaging with online resources, some are not using resources in an appropriate fashion. We discuss how these preliminary findings might inform discussions on the merits, or otherwise, of institutions providing training for students on their use of online materials. We also identify several areas of potential further research
An overview of systematic literature reviews in social media marketing
No full textSystematic literature reviews (SLRs) adopt a specified and transparent approach in order to scope the literature in a field or sub-field. However, there has been little critical comment on their purpose and processes in practice. By undertaking an overview of SLRs in the field of social media (SM) marketing, this article undertakes a critical evaluation of the SLR purposes and processes in a set of recent SLRs and presents a future research agenda for social media marketing. The overview shows that the purposes of SLRs include the following: making sense (of research in a field), developing a concept matrix/taxonomy and supporting research and practice. On SLR processes, while there is some consensus on the stages of the process, there is considerable variation in how these processes are executed. This article offers a resource to inform practice and acts as a platform for further critical debate regarding the nature and value of SLRs
How Firm Performs Under Stakeholder Pressure: Unpacking the Role of Absorptive Capacity and Innovation Capability
No full textOrganizational innovation capability is a critical competitive strategy to generate and execute ingenious ideas necessary to offer new services, processes, and products to stay relevant and competitive. This becomes important in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who depend significantly on stakeholders for an uninterrupted supply of relevant resources to produce and provide offerings to the markets amidst fierce market competition to stay competitive. We draw upon resource dependence and dynamic capabilities theory to investigate how stakeholder pressure acts upon SMEs to utilize their absorptive capacity of developing innovation capability to improve their overall performance. We collected data from 291 SMEs from the manufacturing sector to test the hypotheses of the study. Results suggest that absorptive capacity mediates the influence of stakeholder pressure on innovation capability. Furthermore, innovation capability too mediates the relationship between absorptive capacity and firm performance. This article contributes to theoretical and practical implications
What constitutes the good of education? Reflections on the possibility of educational critique
No full textI am grateful to Michael Peters for stepping in at the last minute when I was unable to make it
to Beijing. And I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to his reflections on the educational
good, which he formulated with reference to ideas from my book Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy (Biesta 2010), marking the occasion of the publication of the Chinese translation of this book. Michael makes a strong case for a contextual answer to the
question of good education and the good of education, which he contrasts with what he characterises as my ethical, non-contextual and, in a sense, even foundational approach. I fully agree that questions about what makes education good, what counts as good education, and what
constitutes educational goods, cannot be determined in abstracto, and cannot and should not be decided ex cathedra, that is, from some authoritarian position. On that point I think that we fully agre
Miejsca kultury w antropologii i etnografii edukacyjnej
No full textThe focus of this article is on culture as a central concept of educational anthropology - a subdiscipline of anthropology that focuses on the fields of education and learning as key aspects of social life. It begins with an introduction into how culture has been criticially conceptualized in anthropology and ethnography and then illustrates how educational anthropologists have used the concepts of culture and cultural critique to analyze educational processes in diverse sociocultural settings. The author points out three primary areas in which anthropology of education enriches our understanding of education and learning: 1) investigations of diversity of educational practices in different sociocultural contexts; 2) critical examination of cultural practices and structures of inequality and exclusion vis-à-vis minority subjects in the educational process; 3) positioning of participatory research approaches and engagement as legitimate methodological and scholarly standpoints. The article build's primarily on examples of texts that have been recently published in the Polish language in order to help situate the perspective of educational anthropology in Polish scholarly discourse and tradition
A Least-Squares Temporal Difference based method for solving resource allocation problems
No full textValue function approximation has a central role in Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) to
overcome the so-called curse of dimensionality associated to real stochastic processes. In this regard,
we propose a novel Least-Squares Temporal Difference (LSTD) based method: the ‘‘Multi-trajectory
Greedy LSTD’’ (MG-LSTD). It is an exploration-enhanced recursive LSTD algorithm with the policy
improvement embedded within the LSTD iterations. It makes use of multi-trajectories Monte Carlo
simulations in order to enhance the system state space exploration. This method is applied for solving resource allocation problems modeled via a constrained
Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) based framework. In particular, such problems are formulated
as a set of parallel Birth–Death Processes (BDPs). Some operational scenarios are defined and solved
to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Finally, we provide some experimental evidence
on the MG-LSTD algorithm convergence properties in function of its key-parameters.
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All righ
Identification of marker proteins of muscular dystrophy in the urine proteome from the mdx-4cv model of dystrophinopathy
No full textSince the protein constituents of urine present a dynamic proteome that can reflect a variety of disease-related alterations in the body, the mass spectrometric survey of proteome-wide changes in urine promises new insights into pathogenic mechanisms. Urine can be investigated in a completely non-invasive way and provides valuable biomedical information on body-wide changes. In this report, we have focused on the urine proteome in X-linked muscular dystrophy using the established mdx-4cv mouse model of dystrophinopathy. In order to avoid potential artefacts due to the manipulation of the biofluid proteome prior to mass spectrometry, crude urine specimens were analyzed without the prior usage of centrifugation steps or concentration procedures. Comparative proteomics revealed 21 increased and 8 decreased proteins out of 870 identified urinary proteoforms using 50 μl of biofluid per investigated sample, i.e. 14 wild type versus 14 mdx-4cv specimens. Promising marker proteins that were almost exclusively found in mdx-4cv urine included nidogen, parvalbumin and titin. Interestingly, the mass spectrometric identification of urine-associated titin revealed a wide spread of peptides over the sequence of this giant muscle protein. The newly established urinomic signature of dystrophinopathy might be helpful for the design of non-invasive assays to improve diagnosis, prognosis, therapy-monitoring and evaluation of potential harmful side effects of novel treatments in the field of muscular dystrophy research
Quantitative proteomic reveals gallium maltolate induces an iron-limited stress response and reduced quorum-sensing in Pseudomonas aeruginosa
No full textGallium-based drugs have been repurposed as antibacterial therapeutic candidates and have shown significant potential as an alternative treatment option against drug resistant pathogens. The activity of gallium (Ga3+) is a result of its chemical similarity to ferric iron (Fe3+) and substitution into iron-dependent pathways. Ga3+ is redox inactive in typical physiological environments and therefore perturbs iron metabolism vital for bacterial growth. Gallium maltolate (GaM) is a well-known water-soluble formulation of gallium, consisting of a central gallium cation coordinated to three maltolate ligands, [Ga(Maltol-1H)3]. This study implemented a label-free quantitative proteomic approach to observe the effect of GaM on the bacterial pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The replacement of iron for gallium mimics an iron-limitation response, as shown by increased abundance of proteins associated with iron acquisition and storage. A decreased abundance of proteins associated with quorum-sensing and swarming motility was also identified. These processes are a fundamental component of bacterial virulence and dissemination and hence suggest a potential role for GaM in the treatment of P. aeruginosa infection
Parameterisation of Radiation Forces for Multiple Degree-of-Freedom Wave Energy Converters Using Moment-Matching
No full textThe motion of a wave energy converter (WEC) can be described in terms of an integro-differential equation, which
involves a convolution operator. This convolution term accounts for the effect of radiation forces acting on the device and
represents a computational and representational drawback both for simulation and analysis/design of control/estimation
strategies. We present herein a moment-based strategy to compute a parametric form of the radiation force subsystem for
multiple degree-of-freedom WECs. The strategy allows for the computation of a model that exactly matches the steady-state
behaviour of the target system at a set of user-defined frequencies, while retaining the underlying physical properties of
radiation forces. The potential and capabilities of the presented method are illustrated considering a CorPower-like device
(heaving point absorber) as an application case
Defensive deception against reactive jamming attacks in remote state estimation
No full textThis paper considers a synthetic counter-measure, combining transmission scheduling and defensive deception, to defend against jamming attacks in remote state estimation. In the setup studied, an attacker sabotages packet transmissions from a sensor to a remote estimator by congesting the communication channel between them. In order to efficiently degrade the estimation accuracy, the intelligent attacker tailors its jamming strategy by reacting to the real-time information it collects. In response to the jamming attacks, the sensor with a long-term goal will select the transmission power level at each stage. In addition, by modifying the real-time information intentionally, the sensor creates asymmetric uncertainty to mislead the attacker and thus mitigate attacks. Considering the dynamic nature of the process, we model the strategic interaction between the sensor and the attacker by a general stochastic game with asymmetric information structure. To obtain stationary optimal strategies for each player, we convert this game into a belief-based dynamic game and analyze the existence of its optimal solution. For a tractable implementation, we present an algorithm that finds equilibrium strategies based on multi-agent reinforcement learning for symmetric-information stochastic games. Numerical examples illustrate properties of the proposed algorithm